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as I say in the novel - they were silhouettes against the sky - and that that was part of the cruelty." lso, the fact that they were done on hills meant that crowds in the distance could see them, that. if you've already been sort of tortured, so that it can go quicker, but some crucifixions were in fact very, very slow, which made them extremely cruel. But obviously, if you have nails in your hands and in your feet, then there's a question of blood. "Death on the cross is the strangest thing because you die of sunstroke, where you're just held up in that way and you can't faint and you can't fall. And I suppose the second issue is that I am a citizen of the European Union, in which such freedoms are allowed and absolutely accepted by everybody." Even if it hadn't been done before, I would have felt an absolute right as a novelist to see this character as my invention and to work with that as truthfully as I could within the terms that I had set myself. "Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist, has written a book called The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, in which Jesus has a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, so it's not as if it hadn't been done before. On imagining what the real life of Christ might have been like Irish writer Colm Toibin's other novels include The Master, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in 2004, and Brooklyn, which won the Costa Novel Award in 2009. that it's occurring word by word, sentence by sentence." it's happening now and go into absolute detail, so you're almost working in the same way maybe a painter is working.
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In other words, you have to go in and pretend. Imagining such violent events as the crucifixion, he says, "is really, really serious work. It was this realization of the distance "between the ideal and the real" as illustrated in the differences between the two paintings that inspired Toibin - who is also the author of Brooklyn and whose novel The Master was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Lambda Literary Award - to want to tell the story of how real people who had known Christ might have remembered his death and the time leading up to it. human activity as sort of odd and strange and random." At its center is the crucifixion, but surrounding that central scene is "every form of.
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Tintoretto's painting, he says, is untidy and chaotic. But it wasn't until he was walking down the street from that favorite painting to see another Venetian work - Tintoretto's depiction of the crucifixion at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco - that the germ of the novel developed. The idea for The Testament of Mary grew from both his concerns with high art and the lasting influence of Catholicism on his life.įor years, Toibin had been preoccupied with Titian's masterpiece, Assumption of the Virgin. But losing his faith did not mean losing interest in Christianity. Eliot and "some writers like Joseph Conrad," he says. Toibin replaced his faith in God with faith in music and art and poetry: Leonard Cohen, T.S. Growing up, he says, "there was no word for it," and he describes his feelings as "absolute confusion." It was after meeting an openly gay friend at university, he explains, that "I moved very gingerly from between being a very conservative boy from a small town and being out with some friends." It was around this time, too, that Toibin acknowledged his homosexuality. "I suppose I had been moving toward it without knowing," Toibin tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "but, yeah, it went very quickly." This changed upon his arrival at university, however, when exposure to new people and ideas soon led him to lose his faith. Toibin grew up Catholic and, for a time, considered joining the priesthood.
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She is struggling to understand why some people believe Jesus is the son of God, and weighed down by the guilt she feels wondering what she might have done differently to alter - or ease - her son's fate. In his new novel, The Testament of Mary, Irish writer Colm Toibin imagines Mary's life 20 years after the crucifixion. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Testament Of Mary Author Colm Toibin